Sunday, April 22, 2018

It's been 48 years since the first Earth Day was declared, though of course the environmental movement has been around since the smokestack days of the 19th century Industrial Revolution. While there has been an increasing awareness of how humans have affected the planet with their various forms of pollution, nothing has really changed in their behavior. Relentless population growth with its emphasis on deforestation, the burning of fossil fuels, and the dumping of our collective waste into the ocean, has led to species extinction, ruined the land, sea, and air, and raised Earth's temperature.

Like the boiling frog analogy, we love to write letters to our politicians, march and demonstrate, but refuse to make any changes to our lifestyle. Our suburban world is centred around the automobile, our consumption economy is based on producing garbage and, while we may live longer, we certainly aren't any healthier. The only thing that might save the planet is if it gets so hot there is mass extinction of the humans.

SpaceX Interplanetary Base On The Moon

If we persist in ruining planet Earth for ourselves to live on, and by all indications that is exactly what we will do unless a stray asteroid does it for us like it did 65 million years ago for the dinosaurs, then we need to get behind the movement for interplanetary colonization. The SpaceX folks are making plans to use the Moon or Mars as an exploration base for Space travel and other organizations will be soon following suit. After all, in another 2 billion years our Sun will burn out and Earth will disappear so we might as well get started.

While space travel is inevitable and no doubt exciting, I can't help but feel a certain fondness for my own beautiful place here on Earth. Outer space is cold and unfeeling and requires all sorts of complicated equipment to survive whereas here I can go for a walk or hike in the forest, swim in the ocean and just enjoy all the life around me free of any encumbrances. For now it's still paradise but, for how much longer, who knows. As Marvin Gaye would say, mercy mercy me.